Weiss Announces First Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Grades by U.S. Rating Agency

These guys (and their ratings) are probably as useful as all rating agencies have been during the 2008 financial crisis.

Just a cursory inspection shows that ‘Weiss’ has already been prosecuted for fraudulent, misleading statements, as well as engaging in insider pump & dumps though their listings:

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2009/34-60125.pdf

and more with the SEC

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2006/ia-2525.pdf

“The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced fraud charges against a registered investment adviser and its owner for allegedly engaging in self-dealing and failing to disclose material facts to clients regarding conflicts of interest, use of investor funds, and the risks of the investments they recommended.”

the SEC alleges that Family Endowment Partners LP and its owner, Lee Dana Weiss, of Newton, Massachusetts, urged their clients to invest more than $40 million in illiquid securities issued by several related companies without disclosing that Weiss had an ownership interest in the parent company of these entities and received payments from these entities.

In the latter docket, we discover that Weiss also has a history of simply displaying ‘ratings’ based on random employee ‘picks’, to wit, employees holding absolutely zero experience in the markets they claim to ‘rate’, whilst misrepresenting themselves as ‘experts’.

“In reality, Edelson was not actually involved in selecting the specific recommendations during a portion of the relevant time period. The recommended trades were selected without Edelson’s knowledge by other Weiss Research employees with little or no specific experience in the particular markets at issue.”

“Weiss Research, in advertisements and other materials drafted by Martin Weiss and Edelson, made claims about the profitability and past performance of its premium service publications that were inconsistent with the premium services’ overall performance; and made false statements that mischaracterized Edelson’s involvement in selecting the recommended investments. “

TLDR: Weiss ratings is a long standing pump & dump operation who makes propitious picks based largely on which securities the owners currently hold, and who, prima facia, had a few years of self-proclaimed legitimacy, yet were later exposed as shilling their own picks to pump their stocks.

That does sound like the most profitable way to run a rating agency. So… do you feel that they are not acting according to the best interests of their shareholders?

Steem (B-) enjoys a relatively good balance of moderate strength in nearly all the key factors considered along with a social network feature.

WHAT THE FLYING FUCK

I can understand technically incompetent idiots not understanding the turing completeness debate or missing that smart contracts exist outside that eth hype bubble but what the hell is a non-top 10 doing above D

Amazon was a insignificant bookstore at one point. You don’t have to be top 10 to be valuable.

For every amazon there were 1000 pieces of shit and the market is in a bubble waiting to hear for what alts and icos will die

I understand that. What I’m saying is…

what the hell is a non-top 10 doing above D

Is not an argument. Market cap ranking is meaningless measure of the future performance of an asset.

Zero transactions fees. 3 sec per block and millions of transactions per day and it use only 3% of all capacity.

It’s a centralized scam.

This is why Bitcoin maximalists consider altcoins to be essentially worthless. Their properties aren’t real. Anything about them can be changed, if they are centralized. Anything about $XRP can be changed at the whims of Ripple the company. Anything about $IOTA can be changed by IOTA Foundation. None of their properties, whatever they may be, are real. They are not rigid, because they do not rest on a decentralized foundation nor are they tried and tested and at the scale of btc. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts who do not value decentralization above all are a misled bunch. None of the properties they value about a certain coin matter, if they do not first cement them in decentralization.

Reminder: You can build something anywhere on the spectrum of decentralized-centralized on a foundation that is decentralized. You can only build centralized on top of a foundation that is centralized.

Give me one altcoin that is better than Bitcoin on just one of these 3 ( Decentralization,Security and Speed of Transactions) but still doesn’t compromise on the other 2. Bitcoin is the most balanced—that’s what matters.

Ad-hominem attack. Not an argument. Try again—I know that’s you using a different username since you waste your time playing dota. git gud.

I have alt accounts, So?

I am not the guy above, you’re just proving how much of a moron you are.

Of course I’m biased… but to give ETH a higher rating than BTC because it

benefits from more readily upgradable technology and better speed, despite some bottlenecks.

means they are not really understanding the struggles ETH is facing in scaling, which are MUCH more severe than BTC. After CryptoKitties we have CryptoCelebrities coming, and FishWars. These three apps can single handedly cripple the network. What then?

It would also be interesting to see if they are distinguishing between currencies, ICOs and smart-contract platforms. ETH are not direct competitors…

Edit: Did anyone save the full list? Pls share it, it’s not available now.

The score for ETH is one thing, but look at what else got a B. Literally trash. They gave a C to both Monero and Dogecoin. This is exactly the system that Bitcoin needs to replace.

The size of Bitcoin’s UTxO set will eventually stabilize in proportion to the world’s population, but Monero’s active global state will grow forever, irrespective of population. In short, Monero isn’t scalable.

Why? ETH is more volatile than BTC, it recently dropped from $1424 to $722 within 4 days and has seen wider fluctuations in value the past year. ETH also has seen way more security flaws than BTC. To give ETH a higher score just because its transaction fees are a bit lower right now seems like a very shortsighted and biased look.

I think you’ve got to consider the EEA, countries doing pilots using private Ethereum chains for national digital currencies (China, Russia, Singapore, Dubai), Zug digital ID on public chain Ethereum, live flight insurance on the public chain, this isn’t even touching all the legit projects being built on top of Ethereum (BAT, GNT, OMG, REP, yada yada yada).. Surely you dont think they just looked at chart volatility and assigned a score? Which speaking of, ETH hugged $300 for about 4 months before moving up and seems to now be hugging $1000.

Edit: Then the icing on the cake is ETH processing 1M+ tx/day

Usually the volatility of crypto scales with it’s market cap, bigger ones having less, so that’s not so strange

Bitcoin being the biggest, most stable and most secure crypto-asset should have the highest grade as an investment into this space in my opinion. Generally you don’t want to recommend more volatile assets as better or more sound investments.

Ethereum may seem promising but there’s lots of competition coming up for it in the space and it’s still very young compared to Bitcoin. To give it a higher rating than Bitcoin with its solid 9+ year track record seems ridiculous to me. And I do like Ethereum, but you have to try and be more unbiased as a serious rating agency.

Key is at this point. To be realistic everything is overvalued, @ this point, speculation is about the future. In the near future and further down Bitcoin still looks the most promising.

ETH is more centralized, less censorship resistant, far less immutable, handles a lesser transaction volume, doesn’t have Layer 2 scaling solutions on the mainnet and the list goes on.

Not saying I’m surprised by these ratings at all, but Weiss is either incompetent or severely biased (I’m very much leaning towards the latter).

Just for the transaction volume:

https://bitinfocharts.com/cryptocurrency-charts.html

That chart is highly misleadinh because it defines 1 Bitcoin TX as 1 transaction when in reality, 1 Bitcoin TX can contain thousands of transactions.

If by contain thousands of transactions you mean that in Bitcoin you dont actually have a certain number of coins in your wallet, but just a collection of transactions, of which you may need to send someone several to make up the desired amount, then that changes nothing. If you mean something else, please give a reference source to what you are refering to.

You are aware that also BTC has forked in it’s history? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=702755.0

It’s important to note those were soft forks caused by protocol bugs. Bitcoin doesn’t roll back when people lose money in shady 3rd party smart contracts. Apples and oranges.

I was being generous with that comment. Btc is just as vulnerable as eth in terms of immutability. Its a community decision. I actually have heard that immutability in eth will be stronger than btc when it moves to POS

POS

Yeah, no. Pos is a non solution. It’s just another turtle on the way down.

Care to elaborate on this claim? Breaking up centralized mining power and reducing carbon footprint seems like a pretty good system to me.

PoS is like chaining a bicycle to itself. It lacks a link to the real world.

I recommend reading this, it explains what PoW really is and why it’s necessary in trustless distributed systems: http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/the-proof-of-work-concept/

Ethereum transaction volume overtook Bitcoins a long while back. At its peek, it still only cost a fraction of a dollar to send a transaction, which arrived in minutes, not hours or days. So I don’t understand where this scaling is far worse comes from.

So I don’t understand where this scaling is far worse comes from.

That’s because you never really spent more than 15min reading and thinking about it.

ETH can handle approx 3x the BTC transactions. That’s not scale, that’s kicking the can down the road. It’s also why it can (currently) handle more transactions, and why these are still confirmed in a short time compared to BTC.

Guess what all the popularity of ETH did? In particular CryptoKitties? It congested the network to the point that some ICOs had to be canceled or delayed because of network delays. (Google it, I don’t support lazy reading.) Guess what happened to the fees? Yep, they started climbing. Again, Google is your friend. The fees are lower? Yes, because 1 ETH = 0.1 BTC!!! The fees are correspondingly that much lower. (If this is not clear to you, you should rethink this whole fee thingie again.)

And now we have the basics for the “scaling is worse off” claim. CryptoCelebrties is coming. And so is FishWars. These are known, but I’m betting more is coming, and not yet revealed. What happens if these dapps reach the same level of popularity of the CryptoKitties? Total. Network. Congestion. The kind that is not driven by spam, but by crazy demand. In other words, ETH becomes a victim of its own success. And this is rapidly approaching, these dapps will be released very soon. So the urgency for ETH to scale is real.

ETH devs, of course, know this. Again Google around to see some of the concerns. And are not happy, just like the early-adopter community is not. So yeah, ETH has a real urgent scaling problem, Bitcoin does not.

The rating company nailed this issue on the head. Ethereum prioritized scaling as the number one objective and is activly developing many solutions, both on and off chain.

Bitcoin, to my knowledge, is banking on the lightening network. IMO bitcoin has demonstrated a lack of ability to innovate and doesnt seem to recognize it has serious scaling issues. No on chain soluyions that ive seen.

Don’t forget the other plus side; the next time Ethereum gets hacked Vitalik can hard fork another copy of it (but only if he has millions invested in the DAO pt2, cause screw you guys and your decentralized immutable block chains and sound money)

It hasn’t though. If you go through my recent comments you’ll see my account of the woes of trying to stand up a full ethereum node and how I eventually gave up. Go to the forums or the issue trackers and you’ll find tons more accounts like mine. I have a beefy machine, a fast internet connect, tons of system knowledge and after several weeks was still unable to stand up a full eth node. What’s everyone else going to do?

That’s not even considering that full ethereum nodes aren’t even fully verifying anymore by default.

Anyway, ethereum is doing lots of interesting things, but scaling at the expense of decentralization is easy; you see bcash trying it and hell, their fees can be lower. The point here isn’t so much to focus on the constant factors but to change the asymptotics of the system. In the short term Bitcoin sucks at this sort of thing, but short of mimblewimble becoming mainstream, I don’t know of other plausible long-term solutions to scaling that aren’t layer 2.

Ethereum has 3 times more nodes than bitcoin. Setting one up is probably tricky atm but very doable. Why do you think bitcoin is more decentralized than ethereum?

The fees are lower? Yes, because 1 ETH = 0.1 BTC!!! The fees are correspondingly that much lower. (If this is not clear

What do you mean ? The fees are lower because the fees are lower… ?

Ummm…. no?

(If this is not clear to you, you should rethink this whole fee thingie again.)

Hint: How much would the ETH fees be if 1 ETH = 1 BTC ? Think about it… it’s not hard, promise.

yes, and if 1 ETH = 1 yacht they would be even higher… but that’s not the case so what’s the argument

Just like how bitcoin is promising lighting, the ethereum devs are also working on solution towards that, until Bitcoin Core doesn’t get lightning out working for EVERYONE, then sadly Ethereum deserves the top rating.

I’m surprised that Ethereum didn’t get a B+ compared to the rest of B’s it’s still much superior.

The node distribution for Ethereum is more decentralized than Bitcoin, but both have centralized mining. Ethereum has higher throughput and handles a much higher transaction volume. Where are you getting your info?

The node distribution for Ethereum is more decentralized than Bitcoin

Where can this be verified?

far less immutable

Referring to hard fork 2016? Check out how many times bitcoin has forked…

Forks are irrelevant if they aren’t adopted. Or would you argue that making a copy of something and altering it has any effect on the original? If yes, I have some voodoo dolls I would like you to examine…

ETH on the other hand has migrated from the original chain to an alterated one because users lost money to a scam. Kinda throws the immutability argument out of the window right there.

There is a documented case from 2010 when a block with 92 billion bitcoins was discovered. The bug was found and software was patched within 5 hours and everyone had to hit the load button” to an earlier blockchain. It was speculated to be malicious. My question is: did anyone try to make transactions with the hacked bitcoins? If not, is it possible the bug was exploited accidentally?

How is this not the same as ETH fork ?

Regardless, any blockchain can be forked at any time, and that’s like the whole point of it. If the market decides for something else, then it’s free to do so.

Bitcoin forked due to an unintended bug in the software that clearly violated both the whitepaper and consensus rules. ETH forked because a lot of people voluntarily decided to send money to a malicious actor and were unhappy with the result while even though it was a completely valid and rule compliant outcome.

Yes, and that is a good thing. What would the other option be, a lot of users using something they don’t like ? Free markets chose which software they run

So then you don’t believe that immutability is an inherently good quality. That’s fine, we simply have different opinions on this issue.

Bitcoin has been rolled back too. Make all the excuses you want to but the two events aren’t very different.

Totally agree we need more coins like Ethereum with 72,000,000 Premines, that have been hacked 3 times and crash everytime an ICO or Kitty Dapp launch.

A grade of A or B can also be interpreted as the investment rating equivalent of “buy.” At the same time, investors should not be overly alarmed by a C rating. It is a passing grade, and for investors, implies the equivalent of “hold.” Grades of D” and E” are the equivalent of “sell.” However, investment decisions should not be made solely based on ratings. They are meant as a tool in the context of a broader risk management strategy.

What makes Weiss’ entry into cryptocurrency ratings significant is its history of independence and accuracy in other investment sectors, as noted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among others.

“Despite extreme price volatility, cryptocurrencies have a bright future and the potential to deliver unusually large profits to investors,” said Weiss Ratings founder Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D. “However, the market is hectic and confusing for investors. They need the clarity that only robust, impartial ratings can provide.”

The Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings evaluate price risk, reward potential, blockchain technology, adoption, security, and other factors. “Due to rapid changes in the data,” explains Weiss, “upgrades and downgrades are more frequent than in other sectors we cover.”

Below is a sampling of Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings, selected randomly to illustrate a variety of strengths and weaknesses:

Bitcoin (rated C+) gets excellent scores for security and widespread adoption. But it is encountering major network bottlenecks, causing delays and high transactions costs. Despite intense ongoing efforts that are achieving some initial success, Bitcoin has no immediate mechanism for promptly upgrading its software code.
Ethereum (B), the second most widely adopted cryptocurrency, benefits from more readily upgradable technology and better speed, despite some bottlenecks.
Novacoin (D) and SaluS (D) are weak in terms of both technological innovation and adoption.
Steem (B-) enjoys a relatively good balance of moderate strength in nearly all the key factors considered along with a social network feature.
“All else being equal, as a cryptocurrency overcomes its individual challenges, it’s likely to be upgraded promptly,” Weiss adds.

Weiss Ratings, which began in 1971, rates 55,000 institutions and investments. Unlike Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, Fitch and A.M. Best, Weiss never accepts compensation of any kind from the entities it rates.

To purchase the full list plus weekly updates, including all upgrades and downgrades, go

I would not recommend making investment decisions in crypto based on these simple-minded ratings. If I wanted my grandmother’s opinion on crypto, I would just ask her.

The guy that wrote this doesn’t really understand the cryptosphere.

Lost all credibility with me when he wrote bitcoin is slower, bogged down and more expensive to transact…meanwhile ethereum isn’t?

Does he understand user base?

Does he understand user base?

Ethereum processes significantly more transactions on daily basis than Bitcoin, and has done every day for months.

I like the ETH project but ‘significant’ is relative. Its still quite low in the grand scheme of things and the network was brought to its knees by novelty digital kittens. I think its obvious to anyone watching, scaling is a concern for any public blockchain right now and will be for some time to come.

You are creating strawmen, Ethereum was not “brought to its knees” unless you think Bitcoin was buried six feet under too.

They had to implement emergency block increase, call that what you want arguing semantics is pointless

Do you have any information to back this up? In Bitcoin the number of transaction outputs is a better figure to compare to ethereum. Bitcoin can contain several real world transactions per tx.

I don’t know how to measure the number of text in Bitcoin, but it’s lower bound is the tx count in the blocks…

I think they’re just looking at the total number of transactions, not UTXO.

UTXO creation still wouldn’t give an accurate account though, because most transactions contain at least two outputs even if there is only a single destination.

I agree that utxo creation isn’t a pure metric either… Just pointing out that comparing the number of tx in a block can be misleading…

Ethereum currently has substancially lower fees and wait times. Eth performs near twice as many transactions per day than btc.

What do you mean by user base?

Gaming on the blockchain is just the begining. Prediction markets and gold will be on the blockchain in a few months.

Stupid irrelevant dinosaurs who literally don’t know SHIT trying to keep themselves relevant in an age when they no longer are. People sucking authorities dicks so hard over this shit. Mon mon mon… uh uh… my legacy world talking about crypto like fucking idiots.. uh uh…

Their rating systems is a riot. Their grading mechanisms are based almost entirely on price fluctuations and things like “transaction speed”. They claim to factor in technology based on white paper reviews but it doesn’t look like they have a significant comprehension of whatever papers they are reading or Bitcoin would have necessarily scored higher by their own descriptions. It’s pretty obvious no reading of lightning was considered as that would equate to instant transaction times which they claim to be looking for. It’s clear no reading of drivechains or sidechains or any other layering mechanism was considered as that would equate to scalability and ease of adding new features which they also claim to be grading on. It’s clear no examination of atomic swaps occurred or there would have been higher grades for blockchain interoperability. Bitcoin should have aced every one of these categories. Overall a totally misinformed joke.

So the big players who cant purchase enough btc are now backing eth. Lol. That seems to be the takeaway.

None of the cryptocurrencies covered currently get a grade of A (“excellent”). In total Weiss currently covers 74 cryptocurrencies.

Anyone else think this sounds like they’re setting up to go all in a crypto, issue an A rating, then dump that shit once the public predictably goes crazy and everyone buys in?

Something in this report stinks, and it smells a lot like the crooked sub-prime mortgage backed securities ratings from early 2008…

The centralized crypto that is being supported by banks and government actors got a higher rating than the most decentralized crypto in existence? What a huuuuuge surprise /s

In their eyes, crypto isn’t about decentralizing. Gives a lot of insight to their credibility

Based on their reasoning; their website is worse than Bitcoin. When was the last time Bitcoin crashed and couldn’t process a single transaction??? LMAO what a joke

Because some people still believe in the old trusted model where you pay attention to what talking heads in expensive suits say. The exact kind Bitcoin was designed to replace.

Horse shit review. It literally looks like someone spilled alphabet soup on a list of cryptocurrencies.

Cheers. Some of these ratings are a little off imo but I think they did pretty well given the volatility.

Centralized overpumped coin with half-broken hash algo that stops working for days at a time, with dev team that is openly misogynistic and hostile to any criticism? Probably some of the reasons.

While due to the lack of knowledge about those things I can’t really comment on that. Still at least the attitude of the developer team when it comes to criticism should probably be no reason to not rate that coin.

Team is viciously hostile because the idea is good but their implementation is broken AF. They are protecting turf to sustain the pump. That attitude is very indicative.

TL;DR:

‘A’ is “Excellent”, it means “Strong Buy” (none of the coins got an ‘A’)

‘B’ is “Good”, it means “Buy” (Ethereum got a ‘B’)

‘C’ is “Fair”, it means Hodl! (Bitcoin got a ‘C+’)

…Soooo Hodl+!

Tail wagging the dog. “Let’s give these shitcoins a better than average rating and pump them while we dump all our holdings at Weiss”. /s

I’m sure it would never happen. I mean, it’s not like it is an unregulated, free for all market or anything.

This shit stinks to high heaven.

Bitcoin C+ (meaning “fair”), Ethereum B (“good”), Novacoin (D), SaluS (D) and Steem (B-). None of the cryptocurrencies covered currently get a grade of A (“excellent”).

It is disappointing to see that full version of their report is only available for purchase by credit card.

@burnintorment

2018-01-24 14:20 +00:00

weiss rating for crypto. This isnt the fake one.

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Anyone have a link to the full list? One of the commentors tried but it appears to redirect somewhere else now.

“Bitcoin (rated C+) gets excellent scores for security and widespread adoption. But it is encountering major network bottlenecks, causing delays and high transactions costs. Despite intense ongoing efforts that are achieving some initial success, Bitcoin has no immediate mechanism for promptly upgrading its software code.”

Check the mempool bro!

It is a fair assessment during these times. Lightning and Segwit are indeed showing some initial success but are not fully there yet (SegWit mainly because of poor adoption and Lightning simply isnt finished yet)